The cover of this month’s Hemmings Muscle Machines takes your author back – further than the early January shoot date, anyway. The story of the revival of Chhay and Leapy Taing’s 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler is well-told in the pages of the May 2014 issue (on sale now!), so I won’t delve into it here. But seeing the build-up shots reminded me of my own mid-sized Mercury travails in the late 1990s.

My fascination with this generation of mid-size Mercury dates back 20 years now. Briefly, in 1994 and 1995, I owned a Thunder Jet 429-powered GT with C6 trans and hideaways; although the seller had brought it from California to New Jersey and the body was clean enough, it was kind of a chunk. It had been Competition Orange, but was repainted Earl Scheib Dark Metallic Blue, had some sort of Fenton spun aluminum wheels on it, and little else going for it. Not much work was done in the year and a half I owned it before I sold it in despair. I made a connection with the head of the Cyclone-Montego-Torino registry, and he helped me find a home for it, somewhere near him in Delaware.

But I was determined, and for a decade, when I lived in California (and, briefly, in the Midwest), I owned a 1970 Mercury Montego, another connection made by the head of the registry. I lived in Los Angeles and bought it in San Francisco, with only a phone confirmation from the owner that it ran. (No Internet pictures in 1997 – at least, not that I had any ready access to.) He picked me up from the airport in Oakland in it – a good sign that at least it ran. It had a Cyclone nose piece, but was otherwise a standard MX – exposed lights, two taillamp pods per side instead of three, flat hood, and a vinyl top that I would later remove with a four-inch putty knife, it was so dried and cracked. The paint was baby blue, but had largely tuned to chalk. Three of the four endcaps were mushed. The heater didn’t work. But the two-barrel Cleveland got the job done. And the price was absurd – something like $750. For a running, driving, nearly-30-year-old car? For someone who grew up in New Jersey, where rust ate alive anything more than half-a-dozen seasons old, this was mind-melting stuff.

And the stories! It was December 1997 when I picked it up, and quite by chance a high school buddy had just left the Peace Corps and was visiting his sister in San Francisco. I invited him to come to Los Angeles, and he bit – but he wanted to go to Reno first, and he played blackjack till the sun came up. That Montego’s first 1,000 miles in my care were cold – Interstate 80 from Frisco to Reno in December, at night, in a car with no heat, wasn’t something I’d planned for – but successful; I actually slept in the back seat for a few hours on the way home as my buddy hurtled back down I-5 into Los Angeles.

The paint job was held up when the guy who offered to paint it – not for free, mind you – decided he’d rather run off with his underage meth-head girlfriend, leaving my primered and disassembled car in a friend’s backyard for someone else to finish…. The stories that came out of Motor Trend track tester Mac DeMere’s mouth when he recalled dates he’d had in the front seat of a Torino of similar vintage, just before he handled skidpad testing for us… The hilariously filthy picture someone (presumably on the line) drew on the inside door, under the blue vinyl door panel… HMM editor Terry McGean did more than his fair share of work on that car, a fact which almost certainly crossed his busy mind briefly when putting the recent issue of the magazine together and choosing a shot for the cover.

What’s more, everything we did to that car largely made it better: better looking, better feeling, better riding, better handling, more responsive. I called it Monte1go – a punny riff on the idea that it was supposed to be a corner-carver – but truth be told, it wasn’t on the ragged edge of anything, just a street driver with some kinky stuff done to it (like a carbon-fiber front bumper). A close second in the naming had been Psych!clone because it had a Cyclone hood and nose but was actually a Montego. Everything I did to it, everything I asked someone else to do and I documented with my camera, I liked. I regretted (almost) none of it.

And then time moved on. I found a new job making toys in the Midwest, leaving publishing altogether after a crisis of confidence. (I even made that car into a die-cast!) Then I moved back to Los Angeles, once I understood that publishing was, in fact, really what I wanted to do with my life. Back and forth across the country, it came with me. In the intervening years, it got occasional use – hardly a daily driver, but still good fun when I could afford the gas.

In 2006, it was stolen out of my garage; four days later it was recovered, sans driveline and keyed all around. I didn’t have the cash to make it right, and I also found myself thinking this way: That car was my prize. It was my takeaway after four and a half years under the white-hot spotlight of California publishing; and through all of the nonsense (and oh, was there nonsense) that I endured during that time, I could drive this car and say, man, this is what it was all about. I got out alive, I won, and I know I won because I have a car. It was a palpable symbol of a world that I walked (or drove) away from on my own terms.

But now, if I went and got it all fixed, the whole time all I’d think about is how this is the car that was stolen from me, and how this used to be right and how that used to work better. (A 1964 Dodge Dart replaced it in my garage, the thought being that if I lived in a warm climate, I needed a convertible, but even it has been a compromise of sorts. But that’s another story for another time.) I loved my Montego. It had to go.

And so, having kept the carcass when the insurance folks issued the check, I moved it on to a new home. Texas, if I remember right. I took pictures as the transporter disappeared down the block and around the corner, the Montego nestled deep in its belly.

It’s now coming up on a decade since I’ve last seen it in person. It’s taken that long for the anger surrounding its theft to subside. I saw an ad for it in 2009, here in Arizona, now running and driving. It had a 429 now, and a C6 automatic, but the basics were all intact – wheels and tires, hood, suspension, four-wheel-disc brakes, all of that. When I saw the ad, I briefly considered marshaling my meager resources to try and get it back, but the idea never gained traction, and later I found the ad had been withdrawn.

I dropped mention of my old Montego when I first introduced myself to Leapy, the son who helped get his dad’s yellow Spoiler on the straight-and-narrow path toward our recent magazine feature, at the car show where I met him. He remembered it; his face lit up when I mentioned it. For some reason, I never think anyone ever would remember anything I’ve done from all those years ago. We set a date, and took photos just this past January 7. And in the early morning light, with the sun reflecting off the clouds and the pink sky and that dramatic nose and those curves, the pictures all came together. Really, Chhay’s and Leapy’s photos tell the story; mine just show off the fine work that was done.

And while I was shooting, all I could think about was what a fool I’d been to let mine go.